The Clamp at Little Rock

(Little Rock is somewhere far away from home, far from what we’ve always known)

             The clamp at Little Rock had extremely dense jaws and knife-like fangs, each tooth drilling pin holes into my skin, where I succumbed to the pressure of everything foreign. Everything there on the edge of sprouting. I picked the finest grain of sand east of the rock's tip and slipped it into my back pocket. At certain moments, I wished to roll it between my thumb and forefinger, and often found trouble trying to retrieve it again and again. Digging in my pocket for the granulate was like blindly digging for lost goggles from the sea, drifting away with the waves and bouncing divergently from shell, to rock, to fish, dancing through the seaweed, by and by into the deep nothingness. The grain was my only grasp on earth, and what I knew. Yet, it was so small and completely fragile, more than several counties over; much too far away. 

             The axe I formed at Little Rock had jagged edges and a flimsy, ready-to-snap handle, the wood sogged from the previous night’s rainstorm. First, I attempted to slash down a small tree with much anger and little force, causing my first axe to completely convulse into a useless pile of soon-to-be-spoiled wood. The tree was carved with a portrait of my younger self. Although I was worn that day, the nests were still being made, and the bird eggs were hatching; therefore, I had to contribute as well, which meant destroying anything in my path that formed a duller edge and prevented the sharpest one. So instead of repairing the broken axe right away, I kicked the minuscule nicked portion of the tree straight on with my foot and limped with sorrow for the remainder of the day. 

             The second grip of the clamp at Little Rock was when I met Robin. He had a young face which was mostly speckled with dirt and dust, and he told me to call him “TB”, short for Threadbare, as his clothes were deeply tattered and his socks never washed. I let him roll around the grain of sand one day when I was able to set aside time to scrabble for it. He told me that when it moved ever so slightly between his fingers that he could see the waters, fish, frogs, turtles, and lines casting out perfectly past the tree branches, smacking bobbers straight down into the jouncing current. He told me the people in this vision were older, some looked to have passed, and were there looking on from a different field. He told me the swell of memories was overwhelming, and passed it back to me. The clamp bit further into my veins, the ants seemed monster-like, and the trees now undeniably small. 

              The final time the clamp dug hardest into my skin, I didn’t mind much, as my arm was completely numb to the pain at this point. TB told me everything was wrong. If I wanted to cut down the tree, have the sharpest axe, and catch up with everything else here at Little Rock, I had to throw away the grain of sand that was weighing down my swing of the axe and causing my aim to be inaccurate, way off. When he told me this bad news I frantically dug in my pocket for it, wishing to find it and let its small tendencies completely devour me from reality, as it always has. To think of the tire swing back home, the lemonade stands, the class detentions, the summer ocean, the clock in my grandmother’s house, the train whistle at my uncle’s ranch, the hugs, the kisses, the life that I lived. Yet the granulate was gone, completely sunken into a sidewalk crack elsewhere on earth, or swallowed by a dirty puddle, gone somewhere that it wasn’t appreciated like how it was deep in my pocket. 

             Although the clamp bit down harder now, forcing me to stay in this far-flung place, what bothered me most was Little Rock, as now it felt unbearably large. Far from the sand, I wished to hide. I wanted to either climb upon the rock to its highest tip to feel all that it does, the power of the largest thing at Little Rock, or to crawl deep under it to cover myself from everything that it endures, to feel the weight and pressure of the work it must take to be this large and important. Yet when I did crawl underneath, it was damp and hollow. I inched myself through echoes in complete darkness, and my first inch of light led me to openness. A beach full of sand. There I stayed cupping my hands with fistfuls of sand, watching each granule fall through, happy to pick them all up again. I stayed for as long as I could, the clamp still attached to my arm, stringing a cord back to the life at Little Rock, where everything there was in full bloom.